POSTSCRIPT
I
n 1954, the year before he died, Einstein was visited in Princeton by Heisenberg, just for a few hours. The old man was clearly sinking. He was seventy-five, and had known for some years that an abdominal aneurysm was swelling slowly within him. Surgery would have been risky, and Einstein saw no point in trying to stave off the inevitable. He had suffered through a bout of anemia but recovered. When Heisenberg came by, they spoke politely of small matters. Not about the war, and not much about quantum mechanics. “I don’t like your kind of physics,” Einstein told his visitor. “There’s consistency, but I don’t like it.” The war had further strained an already distant relationship. Einstein, of course, signed the famous letter to President Roosevelt outlining the possibility of an atomic bomb, but took no part
